Glossary

Our method is to mimic the style and layout of the original DisContinuity
Guide, including its several criteria and points of interest. Until the
Guide goes online, here are those terms defined again:

Roots: Other books, movies, plays, what have you, that we believe may
have have influence the stories. Doctor Who has a long tradition of
homage and pastiche, so we like to take the time out to suggest possible inspirations.
We've made it a rule of sorts not to nominate the original series.

Intertextuality: Inclusions and mentions from Who, outside the TV/audio realm,
but worth elaborating on. Our rule of thumb is that while influences are reasonably
self-explanatory, references themselves are to be made retrospectively and from the
audio to (insert other medium here). So if something published outside of the audios
later contradicts the events of an audio story, then it's someone else's problem. See
below for more on this.

Goofs: Balls-ups, blunders and simple oversights. We forgive them, but take
great joy in pointing them out. That's fandom for you.

Fluffs: Rare treasures, but something worth listening out for in the age of
audio. Relaxed schedules and skillful post-production have simply made these baubles
too hard to find. We persist though.

Technobabble: When good scientific explanations go bad. Pertwee said so
much when he lisped the immortal line "I'll explain later".

Dialogue Disasters: Sometimes those words just look better in print...

Dialogue Triumphs: That's more like it. A continuing tradition, and something
to aspire to.

Double Entendres: They're childish and tend to suggest unwholesome things about
what we ourselves spend our spare moments thinking about. But it wouldn't be the Guide
without them!

Continuity: The C word. Like that other C word (the one that rhymes slightly
with Shannon) that we won't go into here. The original Guide explains it as including
'anything of potential importance in the Doctor Who universe... has a place
in Doctor Who's continuity, whether it was referred to again or not'

Links: 'Direct references to other transmitted stories blah blah blah'
Where possible these are links to the appropriate entries.

Location: The stated (or sometimes in our case, assumed) time and place.

Future History: We've pushed this forward to anything that we think occurs after
the year 2000 of importance.

Q.v. In the original book, an aspect referred to elsewhere in a boxed section.
We're not going to reproduce them here, so if you don't have the Guide at home, just
take three to five minutes thinking about something nice.

The Bottom Line: Our humble and often scathing verdict on the story. While
we're probably as representative of fandom as the original Guide authors were,
and our opinions are no more or less important than anyone
else's, we're the ones being published on this page, so nyeeur.

Introducing... 'Intertextuality'!

The issue of 'canon' has of late reared its head again with a few obvious
nods made towards not only the worlds of the Virgin and BBC Books, but
also the DWM comic strips and other media. To address this aspect, we have
created a new category, 'Intertextuality', which notes intentional
references towards non-television and audio Doctor Who media.

"But guys-" you ask, "why not just leave these in the
Roots section where some of them were before, or put them in the 'Links'
section. They are, after all, links!"

This is a good, if somewhat inelegantly phrased question, with an equally
inelegant answer.

Put as simply as we can, the issue of whether story Y fits in between A
and B hasn't mattered to us outside of the TV stories (which cannot be
touched), and the audios. We believe that this is pretty much where Big
Finish sit also, which is why such references are few and far between, and
we haven't seen any prequels or sequels to the BBC Books occurring in
audio*. As we hear it, the Big Finish audios are based around the TV
series, and maintain their own continuity. For this reason we've kept the
Links section in reference to TV and audio, but as Doctor Who is such a
multifaceted, interlinked, shapeless cake of a beast (picture that if you
will), we felt a line should be drawn, if only for our own sanity.

It would be unfair and unprofessional for us to not acknowledge the wider,
all-embracing multimedia world of DW as it is today; but we remain
unconvinced that the wonderful people at BF or behind BBCi's webcast
adventures lose any sleep wondering whether they can afford to produce a
forthcoming adventure because it might conflict with an even more
forthcoming novel, a series of ice lolly cards, or a comic strip published
in an annual from 1972. We're not in the business of working out what's
canon and what's not, nor are we going to go to great lengths to position
audios between books, TV episodes, comic strips and charity based fan
fiction. Other people do that really really well already, and more power
to their elbows if we're not around mucking things up with our own
convoluted systems and theories.

Hence, 'Intertextuality' - influences and mentions from outside the
TV/audio realm, no less for their inclusion, but worth elaborating -
especially if the reference merits further elaboration.

Lastly, our rule of thumb with regard to 'Intertextuality' is that while
influences are reasonably self-explanatory, references themselves are to
be made retrospectively and from audio to (insert other medium here). So
if something published outside of the audios later contradicts the events
of that adventure, then it's someone else's problem. If someone refers to
the events of 'The Fires of Vulcan' in a BBC novel, then we're happy for
Mr Lars Pearson et al to take care of that end of the equation.

We now return you to our enhanced programme. Happy reading!

The DCG team

*'The Ratings War' notwithstanding; as it is in fact a sequel to a
yearbook adventure, itself a sequel to a DWM strip, and it's a
DWM freebie 'for the readers' and is perhaps therefore less
'official', we're happy to let it go. This time.